How does Complexity demonstrate Design

Almeyda, DNA is simple - the information it stores is complex. Kind of like binary code (lots of 0s and 1s) holding all of the data on your harddrive.Also, very little is required to replicate DNA - a single protein can do the job. The irreducible complexity just doesn't hold water in this case. My understanding is that RNA-based systems are even simpler.You don't need "elaborate decoding machinery" for DNA maintanence and replication. You need it for complete functioning cells as they now exist, but not simply to maintain and replicate DNA.

Hi DarkStar,Just wanted to make sure you know what "scientific findings" and "pieces of research" are. I wanted to clarify, since you posted two examples of what you claim is "legitimate methodical science." Unfortunately you only posted two reviews of findings, and biased ones at that.You see, citing scientific findings generally means that you are citing actual original data, not just someone else's questionable interpretation of another's data. One of the most frustrating things in science is that as soon as you publish your data and interpretations, someone else inevitably hijacks and twists it to their own conclusions.So in the future, please reference actual original papers, otherwise at least make sure you call them review or opinion pieces, rather than the results of "methodical science".Thanks.

Almeyda - quoting someone else making unsupported assertions is not evidence. Firstly, it is completely incorrect to state a single copy error rate. Different organisms have different proofreading and editing machinery, and therefore different error rates - even individual humans can have vastly different replicative error rates.Secondly, environment plays a huge part in error accumulation. This is why people who smoke get lung cancer - they are causing errors in their DNA sequence, leading to tumor formation. But the same is true of many other enviromental insults, not just chemical, but including things like heat and sunlight. The truth is, there is no need for proofreading for replication of DNA, so there is no reason to believe that "the first cell" had proofreading mechanisms.Additionally, that very lack of proofreading would have allowed evolution to take place much faster, because the error rate was higher, leading to more mutations...Also, some proofreading capability comes in the form of an additional domain on an existing protein that replicates DNA, so there is no reason to belief that it wasn't a modification by selection.The claim that potential 'error catastrophes' would prevent evolution is absurd - surely they occurred and killed off many individual life forms. But he's attacking mutation in general - as if he's arguing that no mutations occur at all...Which even you know is not true...

Just for reference, (and maybe you are already aware of this), you'll be hard pressed to find a true scientist claim to have absolute proof of anything. Generally a scientific "Law" is considered proven, but even then new info can add caveats.And a note on some earlier posts you made regarding dismissing another scientist's conclusions without repeating their experiments: Scientific experiments are commonly carried out incorrectly - either in the technical details or in the entire plan of the experiment (like forgetting to do proper control studies). In those cases it is completely logical to dismiss the conclusions, since the experiments they rest on are necessarily inconclusive.(I think that was the nature of the criticism MrHambre was laying on your references, but I don't want to speak for him.)Thanks.

Yxifix - what you describe is true for a fully formed eukaryotic cell, but is not true in general.RNA and DNA can be created by simple chemical reactions requiring essentially none of the details you describe.I routinely create enormous amounts of DNA and RNA in the lab using such a chemical reaction, which includes NO cells, and only a single enzyme.As has been explained already by Ooooook!, some RNAs (as you describe also) can act as enzymes, and self-replicating RNAs have been created that require no other interacting molecules.Here's full text of a peer-reviewed journal article that provides some background on how RNA can form by chemical reactions, and how UV light can act as a selective force to drive RNA evolution. It may not be the best reference but the full text was available.... But what if an electromagnetic disturbance scrambled the hard drive, accidentally creating binary code for a small computer virus, which subsequently replicates, filling the hard drive with copies of itself, and thus information?Then the computer would be "doing something." Incorrect. Red blood cells don't have DNA code, but they transport oxygen throughout your body. edited to fix link...This message has been edited by pink sasquatch, 08-18-2004 01:53 PM

I think most supporters of RNA-to-life abiogenesis would agree that it is quite a leap, but would disagree with "impossible" in favor of "improbable". However, if we are able to deduce that it happened, the probability does not matter. I'd like to see any 'real' evidence from yxifix also, since he takes such a firm stance. Unfortunately I've only seen argument by analogy, followed by the false logic of not-evolution-therefore-intelligent-design.

Ooook! - the "only C's and G's" idea is potentially exciting in a biochemical sense. Since C-G bonds are inherently more stable than A-T bonds, they could have acted to "stabilize" the relatively labile RNA (vs. DNA). Perhaps the A's and T's were a post-DNA expansion of repertoire, within the allowance of DNA stability?Is the reference available on-line?

Thanks... the hypothesis looks quite interesting, I'll have to see what I think of the details when I have some time.

Again, you are describing RNA/DNA/protein relationships at the cellular biology level, where they are, indeed complex. At the biochemical level they are quite simple... Easy. (Also, the same RNA sequence is the template and enzyme.)The first paper (I believe) on self-replicating RNA.A recent paper describing an RNA capable of synthesizing nucleotides (the building blocks of the RNA strand).Another paper describing an RNA that acts as a polymerase, efficiently and accurately copying another RNA strand.No protein or DNA needed. This is what is really exciting! The experiments above created the enzymatic RNAs capable of replicating RNA without designing them.Instead, they made enormous libraries of short RNAs of random sequence, and then simple selected (sound familiar?) those with enzymatic activity.They did NOT design the sequence, they simply filtered out the ones without activity.Also, please address my points in my message #284, which you have ignored twice now, presumably because you have no way to refute them (consider this a challenge).However, since you continue to use your computer experiment as proof, after I've given you a scenario to falsify it twice, I'll repeat the scenario here (for the third time):But what if an electromagnetic disturbance scrambled the hard drive, accidentally creating binary code for a small computer virus, which subsequently replicates, filling the hard drive with copies of itself, and thus information and activity?Thanks in advance for your reply to these points.

yxifix-I do not appreciate your strategy of ignoring the bulk of my posts, especially when I have answered one of your points, only to see you bring it up again with someone else without any comment or refutation in to me.From your post to Ooook!: From my last post (the first half contains the refs, the second half the non-design based method for finding ribozymatic sequences): Was there something you didn't understand that I could explain better?